A Poem by Seamas Carraher

LETTER TO A BELOVED

 

Love, i am wasting

in this hundred years of our exile,

my chest nailed in disease

with other people's debris.

Listen, the concrete

is throwing stones here

in despair.

Nothing can grow and

the killing won't stop.

i have crossed this threshold

between time and our timelessness

on the veins of my wrist.

All the trains are on time,

this is no extraordinary crisis

in a century of greed.

My knives were sharpened on my mother's milk.

i still cross

this country of our homecoming,

a flag burning

in subversion for the dead.

Love, the time is late, and

spring an unknown season

half full

of shooting and bombing,

with fear groaning in all its hollows.

On this point in the unwinding of space

i sit and tease the pain on the point

of your nipples.

i remember your claws that

scratched my old wounds.

i remember when the rage stopped,

your face peaceful like a child.

And then i remembered

a time when the feeding was full

and it was elsewhere,

more human in our futuring,

and another time in its truces,

and with that note cracking your

sleeping forehead

and the day breaking in segments

between our fingers

i joined your thighs with my maleness,

laughing,

at the unwinding of war,

the permanent nature of losses.

 

 

 

Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He lives and writes on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, at present.

Recent publications include poems in Dead Flowers, Pyrokinection, Dead Snakes, Carcinogenic Poetry, Naphalm & Novacain, The Camel Saloon, ditch, Bone Orchard Poetry, Istanbul Literary Review and Pemmican. Previously his work has been published in Left Curve (No. 13, 14 & 20), Compages, Poetry Ireland Review, the Anthology of Irish Poetry and the Irish Socialist (newspaper).